Why Americans should give socialism a try

A worker steams out wrinkles on an American flag before President Donald Trump arrives to speak at H&K Equipment, Co. on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018 in Coraopolis, Pa.

A worker steams out wrinkles on an American flag before President Donald Trump arrives to speak at H&K Equipment, Co. on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018 in Coraopolis, Pa. (Keith Srakocic / AP)

Elizabeth Bruenig

In the United States, we've arrived at a pair of mutually exclusive convictions: that liberal, capitalist democracies are guaranteed by their nature to succeed and that in our Trumpist moment they seem to be failing in deeply unsettling ways. For liberals — and by this I mean inheritors of the long liberal tradition, not specifically those who might also be called progressives — efforts to square these two notions have typically combined expressions of high anxiety with reassurances that, if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright.

Hanging on and hoping for the best is certainly one approach to rescuing the best of liberalism from its discontents, but my answer is admittedly more ambitious: It's time to give socialism a try.

Contemporary supporters of liberalism are often subject, I think, to what I call "everyday Fukuyama-ism" — the idea, explicitly stated or not, that the end of the Cold War really signaled the end of history, and that we can only look forward to the unceasing rise of Western-style liberal-democratic capitalism. (As the leftist scholar Mark Fisher recounted: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.") This assumption is reflected in the blindsided, startled unease of liberals in the era of President Donald Trump: "There are moments when everything I have come to believe in — reasoned deliberation, mutual toleration, liberal democracy, free speech, honesty, decency, and moderation — seem as if they are in eclipse," Andrew Sullivan recently lamented in New York magazine. "For the foreseeable future, nationalism is likely to remain a defining political force," Yascha Mounk fretted this past weekend in The New York Times. "Liberals should strive to make nationalism as inclusive as possible," he warned.

Against this backdrop of liberal disquietude, the notion that everything either will be or already is all right, granted the correct attitude — that "we're better than this," as former Vice President Joe Biden confidently declares on his newly launched political action committee's website — appears particularly frail. It's hard to square the late-Obama-era insistence that "America is already great" with the palpable sense that something — in the climate, in the economy, in society, in politics, in the wellspring of American ideas — is going badly wrong. What to do? Sullivan's solution to liberalism's peril is contemplative "self-doubt and self-knowledge"; Mounk's is to "domesticate (nationalism) as best we can."

But my sense is that while Sullivan, Mounk and all the other concerned liberal observers are right that something is wrong with the state of American liberalism, the problem is much deeper than they allow. I don't think business-as-usual but better is enough to fix what's broken here. I think the problem lies at the root of the thing, with capitalism itself.

In fact, both Sullivan's and Mounk's complaints — that Americans appear to be isolated, viciously competitive, suspicious of one another and spiritually shallow; and that we are anxiously looking for some kind of attachment to something real and profound in an age of decreasing trust and regard — seem to be emblematic of capitalism, which encourages and requires fierce individualism, self-interested disregard for the other, and resentment of arrangements into which one deposits more than he or she withdraws. (As a business-savvy friend once remarked: Nobody gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they're doing.) Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.

That capitalism is inimical to the best of liberalism isn't a new concern: It's a long-standing critique, present in early socialist thought. That both capitalism and liberal governance have changed since those days without displacing the criticism suggests that it's true in a foundational way.

Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist, I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital's stranglehold over politics and culture.

I don't think that every problem can be traced back to capitalism: There were calamities and injustices long before capital, and I'll venture to say there will be after. But it seems to me that it's time for those who expected to enjoy the end of history to accept that, though they're linked in certain respects, capitalism seems to be at odds with the harmonious, peaceful, stable liberalism of mid-20th-century dreams. I don't think we've reached the end of history yet, which means we still have the chance to shape the future we want. I suggest we take it.